I avoid AI in music with my life. That's not an exaggeration. I genuinely go out of my way to keep it out of my process.
And I love AI in other contexts. It helps with productivity, coding, figuring stuff out fast. I use it. But in music it's a different story, and I've been wanting to write about why for a while.
What Is Suno AI and Why Is It a Problem?
If you haven't heard of Suno, it's an AI tool that generates full songs from a text prompt. Vocals, instrumentation, structure, everything. You type "sad lo-fi hip hop about a breakup" and it spits out a complete track in seconds.
And people are passing these off as real music.
I have personally come across AI-generated tracks being presented as genuine artist work. No disclosure, no context, just posted like a human made it. And the worst part is I could tell immediately. There's a specific feeling to AI music — it sounds too perfect, too polished, too radio-ready in a way that feels hollow. Real music has rough edges. AI music has none. It optimizes for the average of everything that came before it and that's exactly what gives it away.
I came up starting in Audacity, which you can barely even call a DAW, pulling type beats off YouTube just to have something to work with. That was my starting point. Every improvement I made after that came from actually learning — studying presets, understanding why things sound the way they do, putting in the hours. When someone generates a track in thirty seconds and presents it as their art, it's not just annoying. It's disrespectful to everyone who actually put in that work.
The Problem With AI Mastering Tools Like LANDR
AI mastering tools are more nuanced than Suno. Tools like LANDR are utilities, not full song generators. I get why people use them.
But what I really don't like is how aggressively it gets pushed now. FL Studio 2025 has AI built right in. It's not a plugin you choose to install. It's just there, front and center, like the assumed way to do things. That normalizes skipping the learning process before you even know what you're skipping.
Mastering used to be the final step where a trained engineer with great ears made critical decisions about how a track translates across different systems. Now people click one button and move on without understanding why anything sounds the way it does. I mixed, mastered, and produced my track Stars. Vocals included. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to actually know what I was doing. It was a fun experience and the project file has over 13 hours spent on it. Tat process taught me more about low-end, clarity, and loudness than any AI tool ever could. You stop learning the moment you outsource the thinking to a robot.
Why AI-Generated Music Sounds Soulless
Here's the thing about AI music. It sounds correct. It doesn't sound alive.
Too perfect. Too mainstream. Too radio. That's genuinely how I'd describe it. Real music has a moment where someone made a weird choice, took a risk, did something unexpected because it felt right. AI doesn't do that. It predicts what the average of all existing music sounds like and reproduces it. That's not creativity. That's pattern matching.
And here's something that doesn't get talked about enough: the artists whose music trained these models never consented to that. Their sound, their style, their work.
Does AI Music Hurt Real Artists?
Yes. Already happening.
Platforms get flooded with AI content and real artists get buried. Streaming algorithms don't know the difference. Labels start asking why they'd sign artists when they can generate music for free. Session musicians, mixing engineers, mastering engineers — all lose work. The whole ecosystem gets cheapened.
And yeah, sometimes it's funny. Seeing your favorite artist AI-cloned and parodied as themselves has a certain chaotic energy. I've laughed. But under the joke is the fact that someone built that without permission, and the actual artist has no say in how their voice gets used.
I'm not saying AI is going away. It's not. What can we even do about it at this point? Honestly, probably nothing. It's profitable, it's here, and it's not stopping.
But it still matters to be honest about what it is. Use it for productivity. Use it to move faster. Just don't pretend it's art, don't pass it off as your own work, and don't let it replace actually learning your craft. That part still matters.
— cav